


Avoidance

by zenstrike



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Everyone Has Issues, M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, Shock, for a bit, not entirely canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 11:11:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13832934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: Bits and pieces of a life after the war start to fall into place and everyone’s treading carefully.





	Avoidance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ellebeedarling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellebeedarling/gifts).



 

He’s alarmed when he wakes up and his sister is leaning over him, radiating her irritation.

Alarmed, and then relieved, and then annoyed. “Solana,” he says—or he tries to. All that really comes out is something kind of like a groan, kind of like a gasp. Or a wheeze.

Solana’s irritation grows. He imagines a sharp-edged tumour growing out of his head, glimmering with his sister’s harsh eyes. They’ll glare each other down.

She helps him sit up. A machine beeps wildly and he realizes slowly that that’s his heart and that, in his chest, is pain. He remembers, briefly, flashing red and blue and Joker yelling and the rumbling of the Normandy. He remembers thinking: well, then.

He thinks now, with his sister silently helping him take a painful drink of water: well, then.

This isn’t the first time he’s lived when he should have died. This isn’t the first time he’s opened his eyes and felt pain—living, breathing pain—rock through him. If he’s lucky, it won’t be the last. He’s almost satisfied with that.

“So,” Solana says, settling into a chair and looking so much like their father Garrus wants to choke. He almost does. “How do you feel?”

“Fine,” he lies in a croak. He wheezes his next breath. “How are you?”

“Fine,” Solana echoes, sounding dry. Mocking, even. Impressive. “Excellent, really. Glad I get to be the first face you see. Pissed off.” She pauses. “I’d like to hit you.” She sounds thoughtful now, a little wistful. Garrus thinks she imagining it and he lets her, choosing instead to inspect the wires sprouting out of his chest and the slightly tingling bandaging around his midsection.

“Give it to me straight, Sol,” he says. “Are we dead? Is death a hospital?”

“Are you serious?”

Garrus shrugs and tugs a sticky pad from his chest and dangles the wire in front of him. The same machine beeps again and Solana slaps the sensor back into place.

Garrus coughs through the fresh wave of pain and his sister has the decency to look guilty.

“You’re on Earth,” Solana says when she’s settled back in her seat. She looks uncomfortable all the same. He tries not to relish in that. “Not that you’ve asked. You and the rest of your team came through a faulty relay. Well, I guess they’re all faulty, really. But. Here you are. A little worse for wear.”

He blinks.

“You almost died,” she snaps.

“Big surprise.”

It’s sobering, though. Remembering. Looking at his sister, exhausted and battered and annoyed as she is. He struggles to breathe for a moment, and notices the way her eyes trace his face like a twitch. She never got used to it, when he was home. He imagines it’s hard to see her brother with a new face and a changed voice—at least, that’s how he he felt. New. Changed. If only in the eyes of his family and—

“Are the others alive?” He swallows and coughs. It hurts a little less. “How’s dad?”

How’s Earth, besides pockmarked and grieving? Has Solana seen Palaven, since she left, since she made it out?

Something twitches over Solana’s expression then and fear grips Garrus, cold and familiar. He can already feel it melting into hot fury, and then he realizes his sister is trying not to laugh.

“What?”

Solana hums and shifts in her seat.

“Sol.”

“The rest of the crew is doing okay. There was something about the relay and something else about the ship that knocked you all flat for a while. You know your heart stopped? Yeah, you died, brother dearest.”

“Not the—“

“Keep talking and I will kill you myself.”

“I’m pretty hard to kill.”

“You ask questions and then keep talking when I try to give you answers.” She shakes her head. “Dad’s good. We came to find you, you know? As soon as we could.” She pauses and Garrus takes the chance to let out a breath he had held unconsciously. “He’s with Shepard right now. I kicked them out.”

“Oh,” Garrus hears himself say, and he’s barely processed the sprinkling of satisfaction in his sister’s voice before he’s trying to throw himself out of the bed.

Another alarm from the machines and a string of curses from his sister summons a flustered human doctor to the doorway.

“Oh good,” they say and help Solana settle him back on the bed. “I told you he would wake up.”

“He’s awake,” Garrus says. “He’s also concerned. And confused.”

In a blink, the doctor is flashing a light over his eyes. “How confused?”

Both Vakarians shoo them away, or try to. The doctor, apparently overworked and overexcited, hovers stubbornly and throws out questions that Garrus refuses to answer. (“Legs? How do your legs feel? Your face? Breathing? I should really check your—“ “Go away.”)

Eventually, Solana throws her arms into the air and laughs her way out of the room, promising to return with their father in tow. Garrus watches her go with mounting panic and when the doctor flits back to his bedside, all flouncing dark hair and rapid fire speech, he turns the steeliest gaze he can muster on them.

The doctor pauses.

“My sister,” Garrus croaks. “She said something about Commander Shepard.”

The doctor blinks. “Yes? The Commander’s here. Ah, somewhere.” They glance over their shoulder, frowning. “He’s been a vigilant visitor for all of you. He and Dr. T’Soni have been very energetic. Brings a lot of life to the floor. Which, of course, we’re all glad for!”

Garrus drops back against the bed and stares straight ahead, watching the door for the return of his sister.

There’s light flashing over his eyes, memories and a goodbye, and Liara’s shaking voice in his ear: “We have to go—we have to get you help—we had to leave him, you know that—“

“Garrus? Can you hear me?”

His attention jerks back to the doctor. Their hands are steady now, resting on his arm, and there’s a smile playing about their lips. “Take a minute,” they say, slow and soft. “You’ve got a lot to process.”

Yeah, Garrus thinks. Not the least of which is his something-or-other (boyfriend, his brain supplies helpful) wandering about with Garrus’s own father.

Alive.

The doctor pats his arm, and then says something about his reflexes and Garrus condemns himself to a whole lot of poking and prodding.

* * *

 

  
_Alive is a fantasy, Ashley had said. We barely got away. We didn’t think we’d make it. Why do you think he would, running around in the middle of it all? There’s a time for hope and there’s a time for reality, Garrus._

_Her grief had been stunning in its cruelty._

_We hope, Garrus had said. That’s what we do._

_He hadn’t figured out if he believed that or was just parroting the Commander who wasn’t there to lead them._

* * *

 

  
Shepard is limping into the room (“Still getting used to the prosthetic,” he’d tell Garrus cheerfully later) and his eyes are bright and there’s a grin splitting his face that throws all his scars (familiar and not) into stark relief against his skin. He’s thin, he’s ragged, he looks like Liara hugged the life out of him when she saw him and Garrus can’t really blame her for it. He looks like a ghost, living and breathing, and Garrus’s father looms over him.

Shepard stops at the end of the bed, his battered hands beating an erratic rhythm against his sides. His grin is lopsided.

Solana comes last, looking much too pleased, and for the first time Garrus realizes all the people he had left in the galaxy are safe and more or less alive.

* * *

 

  
So you spend a couple of days—proper Earth days, like the sort you used to read about or hear about or see in vids—with Castis Vakarian and you think for a while about how you did your best to avoid your significant other’s family even though your awareness of them is pain—

Different pain than the adjustment of losing a leg and gaining a limb. Different than staring into the night and remembering and fearing. Different than the pain of your own disappointment when the Sol Relay was up and running and whirring again and the first (or the second or the third or the fourth) ship wasn’t the Normandy.

It’s a similar pain to failure. Castis and Solana Vakarian are gaping emotional black holes in your vision and you think again and again that this isn’t how you were going to meet them and you had every faith that you were, in fact, going to meet them. Because that’s the kind of guy he is. The “I’m-going-to-introduce-you-to-my-family-and-you’re-going-to-like-it-John” sort.

You would have.

You will.

So you avoided them and you worried and you pretended that the first thing that would leave your mouth when you met them wouldn’t be _I loved him, too._

Save the galaxy, you thought in the throes of the Catalyst’s release. Save your friends.

And when they looked at you across the distance you built you know they’re looking at you with accusation. There’s a lot of that, after the war. Why are they here? What are they waiting for? It’s the slow reconstruction of the Citadel that draws folks, when they can come. That’s what gets everyone.

Waiting is what gets you. Hoping. Occasionally, wishing you hadn’t been pulled out of the wreckage and reconstructed yourself—not for the first time, and Miranda is an authoritative helping hand here too.

Late and later, the Normandy thundered out of a hole in the world.

The galaxy.

So you spend a day, just one more, avoiding your boyfriend’s family and then you summon what’s left of your courage and stand in front of his father and you introduce yourself like they don’t know who you are and you spit out, half-joyful and half-agonized: _I love your son._

Castis Vakarian looks at you for a moment, and the pats the spot on the bench next to him, and you sit with shaky knees like you’re coming out of the worst kind of adrenaline rush.

Or the best.

And you stand, those days later, at the foot of said son’s sick bed and you try to look good: confident and healthy and like it isn’t a pain to wander about and be who they all think you should be. You try not to look at Garrus and think about all the ways you might have lost him, this time or any other.

And you grin. And your face twitches.

“Don’t worry, honey,” you say loftily. “I haven’t told anyone about the serenade yet. Or the babies.”

* * *

 

  
If Shepard is trying to calm him, he’s failed. Garrus laughs anyways.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> :) I hope you like it.
> 
> Prompt was Shepard meeting Garrus’s family after the war.


End file.
